When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  Ross and Cockburn were awaiting the return of James Scott, who had set off down the river in Cockburn’s gig earlier in the day to tell the British Commander in Chief of their determination to press on to Washington. Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane received Scott on the Tonnant, his flagship, near Benedict and a heated debate followed between the admirals about the wisest course to follow. There were three admirals present, Cochrane himself and two others who, like George Cockburn, were as rear admirals a rank below him – Edward Codrington and Poultney Malcolm. Malcolm, whose failing eyesight soon had him writing to his wife, Clementine, for new spectacles, was feeling rather spare. He had convoyed Ross’s troops from France but was now feeling redundant and clearly jealous of George Cockburn. ‘I hope Cockburn will go home,’ he was shortly to write to his wife, ‘only because he is my senior. He is a dashing fellow and I attribute our excursion to Washington to his sanguine advice.’ The key mover in the debate on Cochrane’s flagship was Codrington, the experienced Trafalgar veteran who now commanded Cochrane’s fleet. Scott recalls him ‘appearing to think the attempt [on Washington] was too rash’. Cochrane himself had always doubted the wisdom of marching on the American capital. Malcolm, perhaps partly out of envy of Cockburn, was inclined to be cautious too. Ross was forty miles from the ships with an army that was a fraction of the size of the force that the Americans should be able to put into the field and he had virtually no horses or guns. True, Barney’s flotilla was eliminated, but Cochrane, conscious all the time of Whitehall’s insistence that the army should never stray far from the ships, determined not to allow success to turn into tragedy. Scott was despatched with Cochrane’s reply to Cockburn, and instructed to eat the letter he carried if there was a chance of him being made prisoner. He was told to read its contents before he left and commit them to memory. ‘I carefully perused and reperused the dispatch,’ and the orders ‘were to the following effect: that under all circumstances the Rear Admiral [Cockburn] had already effected more than England could have expected with the small force under his orders; that he was on no account to proceed one mile further, but, upon receipt of that order, the army was immediately to return to Benedict to embark; that the ulterior and principal objects of the expedition would be risked by an attempt upon the capital with such inadequate means’. And Scott recalled that the despatch concluded with ‘a reiteration of the orders to return immediately’.

  The Commander in Chief had pulled the plug on the whole operation. The invasion of Washington was off.

  6

  Be it so, we will proceed

  24 August, morning

  JAMES SCOTT TUCKED away the admiral’s message and made all speed back to Upper Marlborough and then rode on through the night. ‘It was very dark and we had some difficulty finding our way … we fell in with some of the enemy’s cavalry, who however galloped off without molesting us.’ He was relieved at not being caught and having to swallow Cochrane’s note. ‘I was right glad when the bivouac fires of our friends appeared in sight,’ runs his account. And he was shown to the shepherd’s hut where Cockburn and Ross had bedded down for the night. It was 2 a.m. ‘I found both of them stretched out on their cloaks, enjoying the rest which the severe fatigues of the preceding day must have rendered so grateful.’

  Scott gave the Commander in Chief’s letter to Cockburn. The admiral read it and then handed it to Ross. The general took one look at it and then remarked that there was now no alternative but to return. He had always had his doubts, now he had no choice. They had to abort the operation. ‘No!’ replied the admiral. ‘We cannot do that; we are too advanced to think of a retreat; let us take a turn outside and talk the matter over.’ Scott says he and the general’s two staff officers, George Evans and Harry Smith, were:

  at a short distance and could not avoid hearing what passed as they walked to and fro in earnest conversation. ‘If we proceed,’ said our energetic commander [Cockburn], ‘I’ll pledge everything that is dear to me as an officer that we shall succeed. If we return without striking a blow, it will be worse than defeat – it will bring a stain upon our arms. I know their force – the militia, however great their numbers, will not – cannot stand against your disciplined troops. It is too late,’ continued the Admiral, ‘we ought not to have advanced – there is now no choice left us. We must go on.’

  He was determined to convince Ross that there was absolutely no alternative. Cockburn had to persuade Ross that even if they could have called off the enterprise earlier on, there could now be no turning back. He knew that the final call in this major strategic decision was not down to him but to the general. This was a land operation. The admiral was not in command. He led only a handful of sailors and marines. Ross led the army.* But Cockburn was taking as great a risk – perhaps more of one – than Ross: the admiral was flouting the orders of his direct naval superior; Ross enjoyed a certain autonomy as the commander of the land force. Scott says the discussion went on – with Evans also pressing Cockburn’s case – till, suddenly, at daybreak Ross gave in. ‘The General had been much excited, and at this moment, striking his hand against his forehead, he exclaimed, “Well. Be it so, we will proceed.”’

  Ross immediately passed on orders to his other commanders and the army was soon on the march. Evans wrote in his official memorandum that the Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Cochrane, had sent a message recommending ‘in strenuous terms’ an immediate retreat, which ‘the general … with the entire concurrence of the rear admiral did not hesitate to disregard’. Talk of a possible retreat had caused widespread disappointment among the men. Ross’s caution was by now a byword throughout the ranks: it wasn’t just Harry Smith, George Evans and Cockburn who thought the general too hesitant. But when they heard the advance on Washington was on again, ‘a low murmuring burst of enthusiasm involuntarily escaped from the lips of the officers and men, sufficiently indicative of the spirit that animated the hearts of the gallant band’.

  Cockburn had persuaded Ross to take a huge gamble. If they failed, their careers would be at an end. In a letter to his wife a week later, Ross wrote: ‘at the moment the attempt was made upon the city of Washington, I felt apprehension of the consequences of failure’. They would be disowned by Cochrane for disobeying orders. The British government, press and public would condemn them for recklessly transforming a moderate success into a fiasco. The odds against them were high: their army was dangerously far from its base with its rear quite unprotected; their 4,500 men faced a potential enemy twice or three times their number; British infantry alone would have to tackle American guns, cavalry and footsoldiers on ground of their choice; their enemies would be fighting for their capital, their homes and their families. But Cockburn – and Ross, whether he finally gave way to his own inner conviction or to Cockburn’s impassioned persistence – could count on one proven asset that now had to be decisive: the quality of their soldiers. Ross would lead a force whose battle honours were the admiration of the world. In the last two and a half years they had crushed the armies of Napoleon in victory after victory in the field, from Salamanca to Toulouse, and they had blasted their way into strongholds like Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz that made Washington look defenceless. These gritty veterans of the war in Europe would confront an army of untried, poorly trained part-timers. And the experience of the last week was promising: any professional opponent would have used every opportunity to harass the invading army’s flanks and rear and plant impediments in its way. The British had suffered only the most trivial pinpricks and there had been no attempt to use trees or other obstructions to block their route. The die was cast. For Cockburn, Ross and their army it was now either victory or disgrace – even death.

  * * *

  The last-minute hiccup in the British high command – and the brief chance of a reprieve for the city – was imperceptible to the frantic population of Washington. One eyewitness of the panic in the capital that night at 1 a.m. on 24 August said, ‘I cannot find language to express the situation of the
women and children, who are running the streets in a state bordering on distraction; their husbands, father and brothers all under arms, scarce a man to be seen in the city. Enemy reported to be 13,000 strong.’ Each family had the agonising decision to make: should they leave their homes to the mercy of the British, if they were to enter the city, or should they stay and risk all? Very few decided to stay.

  Winder still believed there was a chance the British would head for Annapolis. But if their target was Washington, which even he had now come to believe the most probable, there were two possible approaches. They could march west and cross the long Eastern Branch Bridge. Or they could thrust north-west to Bladensburg and cross the much shorter bridge there. Bladensburg had the obvious attraction to the British of being the lowest point where the river was fordable if the bridges were destroyed. But Winder still wasn’t sure.

  He decided his best option was to withdraw his army direct to the city itself. He had left the lower, longer bridge intact in order to allow his army to do that. And it was across it that he dragged the exhausted troops and heavy guns he had held at Long Old Fields throughout the day. Once they were across there was every reason to blow all the bridges up. He ordered the captain of the Washington artillery to supervise this operation, and eight barrels of powder were sent up from the Navy Yard in small boats to be ready to do just that. But somehow the bridge was never destroyed. According to George de Lacy Evans, Ross deliberately kept the Americans guessing by taking a road which initially led towards both bridges – the bridge across the Eastern Branch and the bridge at Bladensburg. The third, wooden Stoddert’s Bridge was set alight and destroyed on Winder’s orders in the early hours of the 24th. If Winder had expressly destroyed the long Eastern Branch Bridge once all his men were across and effectively ruled out that approach for the British, he could have concentrated his army at Bladensburg. But throughout the night and until ten o’clock the following morning he remained unsure which bridge the British would use, and those hours of uncertainty further strained the tolerance of a number of his commanders.

  Through what must have been the longest night of his life, William Winder rode backwards and forwards from one unit to another desperately trying to reconcile the deployment of his forces with his uncertainty about the British objective. He called Benjamin Burch, Washington’s artillery captain, out of his tent and asked him to carry out ‘one of the last good acts which it might ever be in my power to do for my country that night’ – to guard the Eastern Branch Bridge. Burch, who recalled that his men were ‘so fatigued they could hardly stand by their guns’, had to haul his artillery to the end of the bridge in the pitch dark and stay alert all night. Winder didn’t relieve him and his men till ten o’clock the following morning. He called in Joshua Barney’s flotillamen to replace Burch, so that Burch and his gunners could hurry to Bladensburg to stop the British there. Another late-night call Winder made was on Commodore Tingey, who was fast asleep in his house at the Navy Yard. Was there enough gunpowder on its way to blow up the bridge? he asked. Tingey said several casks were ready to move, but Winder told him to increase the quantity. He then went back to the bridge to make sure it was properly guarded, and finally back to his headquarters ‘about three or four o’clock, much exhausted, and considerably hurt in the right arm and ankle from a severe fall which I had into a gully or ditch on my way to the Navy Yard’. In between all this shuttling to and fro Winder had been trying to communicate with the commanders of the two halves of his army, General Smith in Washington whom Winder couldn’t track down in his camp, and General Stansbury who had taken matters into his own hands at Bladensburg. Winder was furious. ‘I learned about this time, with considerable mortification, that General Stansbury, from misunderstanding or some other cause, instead of holding a position during the night, in advance of Bladensburg, had taken one about a mile in the rear … and was at this moment on his march into the city.’

  Stansbury was now well on his way towards Washington with his brigade, having ignored Winder’s earlier order to resist any British assault at Bladensburg. He now received another message from Winder repeating his insistence that he, Stansbury, should stay at Bladensburg. It was daylight by now and Stansbury called another meeting of his top staff: ‘I laid the letter [from Winder] before them.’ One of his top commanders said the men were ‘worn down and exhausted … and that he should consider it a sacrifice of both officers and men to seek the enemy at any considerable distance from General Winder’s force…’ Once again they all agreed to ignore Winder’s orders and continue towards Washington. Stansbury and his commanders were convinced that they had a far better chance of thwarting any British assault in a favourable defensive position nearer Washington than eight miles away to the north-east at Bladensburg. It was a blatant challenge to Winder’s authority.

  It wasn’t only Winder’s subordinate commanders who were expressing unease and even contempt for their Commander in Chief. One of those who had dined with the President at the farm near Long Old Fields the previous night was a respected intellectual and pillar of Washington society, William Thornton. He was born in the British Virgin Islands and had trained in medicine at Edinburgh University before travelling to America. He was now a fifty-five-year-old doctor and architect, who had among other things designed the original US Capitol buildings for George Washington. The Thorntons were close to the Madisons but that didn’t stop William’s forthright wife Anna Maria – no doubt reflecting her husband’s views – writing in her diary of the ‘great error in [which] Winder and all engaged’. It was a mistake pulling the army back across the bridge into Washington, ‘which gave the troops an opportunity of dispersing, particularly those who had families or homes in the city’. Winder, she said, should have destroyed the bridge and concentrated his whole army at Bladensburg. ‘Instead of this the troops were marched off their legs.’

  Winder’s problem was not only his own bumbling: he was poorly served by his colleagues and subordinates. Stansbury had openly disobeyed him. Others failed to respond to his urgent calls for action. The Virginia militia, who’d arrived in the city on Tuesday the 23rd under Colonel George Minor, were eager to reinforce the army but were without weapons and ammunition. Anxious to lead his men to the front Minor reported his requirement to the President, who referred him to the War Secretary John Armstrong. Armstrong told him the arms could not be obtained that night and he should report to a Colonel Carbery in the morning. But on the Wednesday morning there was no sign of Colonel Carbery. After searching for him for hours Minor sought out Winder himself, who personally signed an order to the armourer to equip the men. ‘On my arrival at the armoury, I found that department in the care of a very young man, who dealt out the stores cautiously, which went greatly to consume time.’ For example, said Minor later, his own officers, keen to get the job done, counted out the flints their men needed, but ‘the young man had to count them over again before they could be obtained…’. The result of all these delays was that Minor’s men were not in time to reinforce Winder.

  Even when Winder woke that morning after an hour or two’s sleep he still couldn’t be sure where the battle for Washington would be fought. At nine o’clock President Madison came to his headquarters. For an hour he discussed the crisis with Winder, James Monroe, the Secretary of State, now acting as an alternative battlefield commander, Richard Rush, the Attorney General, William Jones, Navy Secretary, Thomas Tingey, the Navy Yard commander, George Campbell, the Treasury Secretary, and – a late arrival – War Secretary John Armstrong. Madison recalled that he and his ministers grew increasingly impatient at Armstrong’s absence and expressed surprise when he finally turned up. Campbell in particular was quick to criticise Armstrong. He’d met the War Secretary the night before and asked him in a forthright manner why the army had waited this long and retired this far before confronting the enemy or at least doing much more to harass their advance. Surely to make the fate of the city depend on a single battle, to be fought on their side by raw, ine
xperienced troops, was too much of a risk? Campbell was surprised to find that Armstrong appeared to agree with him, and so he pursued him further. Had Armstrong offered his advice, and was he ready to make suggestions to Winder about how best to proceed? Armstrong replied that he had left all that to Winder: to express his own opinion might be ‘indelicate and perhaps improper unless he had the approbation of the Executive for so doing’. Campbell was astounded: ‘surely feelings of delicacy … should not be allowed to come into collision with the public interest?’ What on earth was the use of a war secretary if he wasn’t ready to question and advise his commanders?

  Campbell was so disturbed by this conversation that he raised it with the President at that morning’s meeting. Campbell said he ‘regretted the reserve apparently observed by the Secretary of War’, to which Madison replied that he was sure Armstrong was able to volunteer his opinion and that Winder would listen to him. Not, it appears, without your say-so, replied Campbell. Madison agreed to talk to Armstrong. ‘I could scarcely conceive that General Armstrong could have so misconstrued his functions and duty as Secretary of War; that he could not but know that any proper directions from him would receive any sanction that might be necessary from the Executive.’

  Armstrong’s extraordinary detachment had already prompted Madison to doubt his judgement. The morning meeting only strengthened the President’s view that his War Secretary was living in a different world. Armstrong’s determination not to be involved in matters that were clearly within his remit was thought particularly odd in view of the fact that he later admitted he’d just received a note from Winder ‘asking counsel from me, or from the government’. Madison asked Armstrong point blank – close enough to the Attorney General Richard Rush for him to remember the words – whether he had any advice or plan to offer. ‘He replied that he had not.’ He then added his forecast of what would be likely to happen in any battle between America’s army and the British. ‘As it was to be between regulars and militia, the latter would be beaten.’